The joys of re-entering data!

Here at Athabasca University we are finally getting serious about ELGG and bringing our instance (Me2U) inside the single signon set of apps we provide to all staff and students (portal, library, Moodle, etc.). This means all new login names and thus all data from the old version is lost (sigh…..)

It is annoying having to re enter data in my profile for even my own system, much the less the hassle of doing so for any of the other 1618 Web 2.0l apps (up from 1400 last month) listed now on www.go2web20.net

This frustration lead me check out the blogsphere for any progress on profile portability. I liked Rolf Skyberg’s rant that “It’s not that Facebook hasn’t done some new and clever work in opening their platform, but they haven’t gone far enough to offer the next-gen interoperable experience. People want more, and FB has given them yet another, site to maintain, monitor, and fret over while still locking it away in a gated community.”

Hunter Nield at socio media added some technical detail on the issue with some of the emerging solutions. He described micro-formats and the forever just-around-the-corner Friend of a Friend. But is seems Web 2.0 architects are more interested in gathering eyeballs than in creating the glue to stick apps together and reducing redundancy. Until this happens our capacity to engage with new applications is severely limited due to the ever consuming time pressures needed to establish a presence in every new application and domain.

On the topic of new web 2.0 apps, I commented a while back about Avanoo with their interesting approach of allowing users to create Likert-like scaled questions, solicit responses and then analyze the responses by demographic data. They didn’t seem to reach their goal of 100,000,000 contributions, but instead changed the whole site to ‘Avanoo 2″ that seems to have buried the interesting question part to become yet another plain jane – ‘lets all work together and share our proflies’ site and now one of the two founders is wondering why no one contributes!

We hardly have time to play in our own sand boxes (even if they are networked) much less time to play in yours!